Thursday, March 30, 2017

Mike Flynn hints he would testify in Trump-Russia inquiry in exchange for immunity

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has suggested that he may have offered to testify before the FBI and congressional committees about potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia in exchange for immunity.

Flynn, who was ousted from his post in February for misleading the White House about discussions he held with the Russian ambassador to the US, released a statement on Thursday through his lawyer declaring that he had a story to tell – but was first seeking “assurances against unfair prosecution”.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Flynn’s offer to cut a deal with the FBI and Senate and House intelligence committees.

“General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit,” Flynn’s counsel, Robert Kelner, wrote in the statement.

The magic word here dear readers? ❝ Immunity ❞. One does not ask a law enforcement agency like the FBI for immunity in exchange for testimony unless one knows that criminal deeds were perpetrated and that one was a participant in those deeds. That is a simple fucking statement of unvarnished reality.

So what will we tell the children dear readers? The goddamn truth - that is what we will and that we must tell them.

And it will be the very same truth that The Gadfly and many others were saying from the beginning of this whole sordid mess -- namely that Donald J. Trump is a sleazy, corrupt, amoral con man and deceiver who in a nation of better educated and better informed and less assholish citizens, would never have gotten anywhere near the levers of governmental power, much less actually gained full control of them.

And to The Gadfly's conservative friends and family who are Drumpf supporters - you bet your asses that The Gadfly is going to hold every one of you to account on this shit - because not doing so means you get away scot-free with being willing enablers of people whose intent from the start was destroying the inherent decency of this nation and the greatness of our democracy, and that is a level of outrageous foolishness and selfishness which simply cannot be allowed to pass.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Hey -- if the whole fucking bunch are already in bed with the Russian spooks, why not the Chinese spooks too?:

Kushner Family Stands to Get $400 Million from a Chinese Firm in 'Unusually Favorable' Deal

Vishaka George / Reuters Mar 14, 2017

A company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law, stands to receive over $400 million from China's Anbang Insurance Group, that is investing in a Manhattan building owned by the Kushners, Bloomberg reported.

Details of the agreement are being circulated to attract additional investors, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The building, a 41-floor tower located at 666 Fifth Avenue, was purchased by Kushner Companies in 2006 for $1.8 billion, which at the time was the highest sales price for a single building in Manhattan.

The planned $4 billion transaction includes terms that some real estate experts consider unusually favorable for the Kushners, the Bloomberg report said.

Businesswoman Who Bought Trump Penthouse Is Connected to Chinese Intelligence Front Group

ANDY KROLL AND RUSS CHOMAMAR. 15, 2017 10:25 AM

When a Chinese American businesswoman who sells access to powerful people recently purchased a $15.8 million penthouse in a building owned by President Donald Trump, the deal raised a key question. Was this a straightforward real estate transaction, or was this an effort to win favor with the new administration? The woman, Angela Chen, refused to discuss the purchase with the media. The White House and the Trump Organization would not comment on it. Further investigation by Mother Jones has unearthed a new element to the story: Chen has ties to important members of the Chinese ruling elite and to an organization considered a front group for Chinese military intelligence.

They don't care that their mighty hero could possibly be a manipulated puppet of Russian and Chinese oligarchs. As long as the dreaded Billary was defeated and Obamacare is destroyed, that's all that matters.

And of course nobody in the gutless media is asking the most blatantly obvious question of them all to the Drumpf clan --- just whose fucking side are you people on??

----TFG

P.S. -- if you truly want to translate the Chinese symbol in the title of this post -- go here:

Monday, March 13, 2017

If this weren't so fucking horrifying and frightening, it would almost -- almost -- be funny:

The idea was simple enough: publish as many absurd, obviously fake stories imaginable, and see if anyone actually falls for it. The results of this experiment were both fascinating and disheartening.

“BREAKING: Satire Makes Fools Of Gullible Trump Supporters.”

That’s the headline James McDaniel published on his intentionally fake news website, UndergroundNewsReport.com, earlier this month.

Within just two weeks of his website going online, McDaniel had already amassed more than a million views, thousands of comments on his stories, and hundreds of thousands of “likes” and “shares” on Facebook.

“While writing them, I was aiming for stories that no one would believe, but rather would be satirical in an age where disinformation is so prevalent,” McDaniel wrote on his website. “Just for fun, I decided to post some of the stories in Trump fan groups on Facebook to see the reactions.”

One fake story, headlined “Wikileaks: Obama Ran Pedophile Ring Out Of Whitehouse” amassed more than 40,000 views. Published in February, the top comment reads:

“I believe it. They are scum. Down with the obama’s his it wife (sic) are him took 111 million dollars worth of stuff that should be repaid back to the taxpayers. Back to America.”

McDaniel created fake news suggesting Michelle Obama had a sex change and Barack Obama tweeted out that “Trump must be removed by any means necessary.”

“To my surprise, the Trump masses embraced my stories as fact, almost universally,” McDaniel wrote. “It seemed that there wasn’t anything I could write that was too wild or outrageous to be believed by this particular audience.”

In a fake post about how the singer Adele told BBC news that Obama “should be in jail,” one of the top comments, posted Feb. 24, gushed over the fake news website.

“I’m impressed by how this website tells us like it is,” the commenter wrote. “No sensationalism at all – straight facts and well documented research, with sources and all. Thank god for the alternative media, that saves us from the mainstream garbage by showing us the truth.”

So some guy, as a social experiment, creates a phony news website. He posts all kinds of absurdly crazy, completely made up stories about Obama and Hillary, and then plasters links to those stories and his hoax website on Drumpf groupie Facebook pages. To his surprise (not The Gadfly's though) the Drumpf cult loons go ga-ga over the hysterically bogus stories and begin sharing them like hits off of a meth pipe with their dumb shit friends and family members and voila! -- instant alternative facts paradise for the faithfully insane. Well . . . Ron White pretty much stated it best:

And as for that "fucking horrifying and frightening" part The Gadfly spoke of? . .

The Gadfly has no doubt that the infernally condemned ghosts of Hitler and Goebbels sigh heavily while writhing in eternal agony on Lucifer's spit in the depths of hell -- wondering and fantasizing about what manner of jocular evil could have been had if only they'd been born 40 or 50 years later in history . . . .

Sunday, March 12, 2017

The Gadfly is typically not in the habit of reveling in another human being's misfortune, but there are those very rare cases where the individual suffering the misfortune is such a an evil, vile creature, that any sentient being would find it extremely challenging to stifle a modest smile or a giggle fit.

Frank Ancona, the imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, smelled like cat piss.

The stench clung to the 51-year-old's graying hair and mustache. It seeped into the fabric of his clothes and hung on him like a blanket. He was unhappy about it, but he did not seem to know what to do.

Full Stop! The opening lede to that article simply has to be an instant classic in the annals of American newspaper publishing - ❝The Imperial Wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Smelled Like Cat Piss.❞ OMFGLOL!

Go read this whole incredible story and marvel at how this group of people, who do actually exist in our society in this here 21st century, who fancy themselves the "master race", and who as it happens unsurprisingly, endorsed Donald Drumpf, are really in fact nothing more than the dregs of mankind's biological, social and intellectual advancement. Priceless.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming exposing Drumpf as the fascist kleptocrat that he is.

These are the kind of amoral monsters have sprung forth from the wingnut primordial ooze and that Drumpf's ascendancy to power has emboldened to let their hateful freak flags fly. This woman believes, and you know many conservatives of her ilk would enthusiastically condone it, that it is her right to murder or maim other human beings (all the better if minorities) because of the manner in which they have chosen to exercise their constitutional rights to free expression and protest. God forbid that someone somewhere protesting injustice might slightly disrupt her and her pal's precious travel plans and possibly cause them to miss the opening ceremonies to their local KKK rally.

The Gadfly has long stopped being shocked by the repulsiveness of these right wingers. The best hope that we all have at this point is that there is a heavy shoe waiting to be dropped on the Drumpf/Russian connections and election hacking sordidness which ultimately culminates in the orange haired shitgibbon being impeached, and subsequently, his lizard brain cult followers being marginalized so far to the fringes of civilized society that they become nothing more than minor nuisances not unlike flies buzzing around any given farm animal's hind quarters.

Friday, March 10, 2017

There have been times dear readers, where The Gadfly experiences an involutary pang of regretful guilt for writing things on the pages of his shitty little blog that harshly savage his fellow conservative Americans - let's revisit an excerpt from yesterday's post shall we?:

❝ But as The Gadfly has been telling you for years on the pages of this shitty little blog dear readers - this is who your modern-day conservative, Teabagging movement is. Their hatred and their cruelty and their disdain for any segment of humanity unlike themselves is their life force -- and by god they are dead set determined to ensure that American society becomes the dystopian, third world hellscape of their fevered, right wing dreams. And now that they have been emboldened by having their chosen emperor triumphantly ascend to the crown, their lust to inflict as much suffering and misery on as many people as they possibly can in the name of their warped views of what constitute liberty and freedom is officially run amok.❞

Thankfully for The Gadfly those pangs of remorse are not frequent occurrences for inevitably those very same conservatives always manage to find excruciatingly ugly new ways to thoroughly validate The Gadfly's authored onslaughts.

To whit:

Imprison Hillary. Check - ✔

Hate Mexicans, Muslims and Jews. Check - ✔

America is a theocracy, not a democracy. Check - ✔

Round up, imprison and/or kill anyone with liberal views. Check - ✔

The saddest part of that video wasn't the lock Hillary up chants or the open bigotry or the bald-faced contempt for democracy -- nor even the call for genocide of liberals -- it was the 13 year old kid who commenting upon a Jewish counter protester stated, "if she is Jewish, she should go back to her country." It takes a fundamentally sick adult mind to imbue a 13 year old kid with those kinds of hateful views. That is prima facie evidence that the right is working diligently at ensuring yet another generation of hateful, closed-minded, bitter segregationists and fascists. But that kind of indoctrinating of the young and impressionable is a terrifying feature, not a bug of this modern day conservative movement, which in and of itself allows The Gadfly to find more than sufficient justification for his forceful views on the subject of their fitness to be members in good standing of civilized society.

Moving on to another example that The Gadfly sees as justification for his authored aggression toward the conservative movement - observe:

Texas GOP Pushes New Law That Would Allow Doctors to Lie to Pregnant Women About Fetus’ Health Issues

In yet another unbelievably heartless move by the Republican Party, the Texas Senate is about to vote on a bill that would allow doctors to conceal from women that a child will be born deformed or disabled: Texas ‘wrongful birth’ bill would allow doctors to lie, critics say.

Honestly dear readers -- The Gadfly cannot think of anything more un-Christian, more deceitful, more cruel and inhumane than giving ideologically-minded physicians legal cover to to lie to a pregnant woman about the health of the fetus that she is carrying. It is an idea borne from the minds and souls of monsters - and The Gadfly will not debate that opinion with anyone for one goddamn nano-second.

The Gadfly doesn't enjoy demonizing these conservatives, he truly wishes we didn't have to go down this road, but history has shown us again, and again, and again that man's inhumanity toward man is like a persistent cancer - if you don't give it a good dose of radiation or chemo now and then, it has the potential to spread rapidly and induce horrific suffering culminating in death.

So to sum up, The Gadfly has once again successfully suppressed whatever fleeting pangs of guilt he had for writing what he did yesterday in that post. This is a battle for the future of a decent, civilized and inclusive American society and democracy dear readers. The ends do justify the means in such a momentous battle, therefore, do not expect The Gadfly to tone down his writing style and temperament when it comes to the subject of a certain group of people who appear dead-set on turning this country into the 21st century version of the Third Reich.

The Gadfly would feel a much deeper level of regret and guilt if he were to just stand by meekly and silently and did not speak his mind and his heart on these matters.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

So - now that it is evident that Von Ryan's Obamacare repeal Express is barreling down the tracks at maximum speed, perhaps the vaunted engineer of that speeding locomotive should pay attention to that series of sharp curves coming around the next bend . . . . specifically curves like this excerpt from a late 2015 '60 Minutes' interview with then candidate Drumpf:

The following script is from "Trump" which aired on September 27, 2015. Scott Pelley is the correspondent. Robert Anderson and Aaron Weisz, producers.

Scott Pelley: What'syour plan for Obamacare?

Donald Trump: Obamacare's going to be repealed and replaced. Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what's going on with premiums where they're up 45, 50, 55 percent.

Scott Pelley: How do you fix it?

Donald Trump: There's many different ways, by the way. Everybody's got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, "No, no, the lower 25 percent that can't afford private." But--

Scott Pelley: Universal health care?

Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much betterthan they're taken care of now.

Scott Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of how?

Donald Trump: They're going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably--

Scott Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?

Donald Trump: --the government's gonna pay for it. But we're going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything.

Which brings us to Trumpcare as devised and is to be implemented by this smug prick:

So quick review - Drumpf is on videotape, while in candidate mode, brashly bragging that the outcome of his and Ryan's repeal of Obamacare and what it means for average Americans is, "Everybody's got to be covered," and a President Drumpf is "going to take care of everybody" no matter the political cost and "Everybody's going to be taken care of much betterthan they're taken care of now." And that's not all - Drumpf says that the "uninsured person" is "going to be taken care of," and incredibly all of this wonderful health care taking care of magic is Donald J. Drumpf's big red, white and blue gift to America because "the government's gonna pay for it," by god and if Donald J. Drumpf says that it's so, it must be true because in Drumpf's world, every American is precious and "they can have everything," and Donald Drumpf would never lie about something so critical to the quality of life, such as healthcare, to the working men and women and their children of this nation would he?

I Caesar will bestow the gift of my greatness and my generosity upon you poor bastards. Fear not!

To which The Gadfly naturally responds - if you believe any of that horseshit, you are much too fucking stupid to be reading this shitty little blog - please leave now and go back to huffing your spray paint or sniffing your airplane glue or whatever other routine activity it is that you do that slaughters your brain cells en masse.

There's a reason that Ryan and Drumpf are frantically trying to jam through the Obamacare repeal legislation without any expert analysis of it's impact -- they know damn well that it is effectively the affordable access and coverage death knell for millions of Americans -- mostly poor, mostly elderly, mostly already sick, the most vulnerable. But they don't give a fuck -- because to sneak in provisions giving tax breaks to CEO's making over $500k a year and premium tax breaks to those making over $100k a year, those are the true beneficiaries of their "plan," and the only way you can make the already wealthy wealthier is to snatch a few dollars more from the already poor and middle class pocketbooks.

But as The Gadfly has been telling you for years on the pages of this shitty little blog dear readers - this is who your modern-day conservative, Teabagging movement is. Their hatred and their cruelty and their disdain for any segment of humanity unlike themselves is their life force -- and by god they are dead set determined to ensure that American society becomes the dystopian, third world hellscape of their fevered, right wing dreams. And now that they have been emboldened by having their chosen emperor triumphantly ascend to the crown, their lust to inflict as much suffering and misery on as many people as they possibly can in the name of their warped views of what constitute liberty and freedom is officially run amok.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Now The Gadfly will acknowledge that this is quite the overly large, low hanging Pinata to be taking such a mighty swing at, but it really cannot be emphasized often enough just how disturbingly out of touch with reality some of these hard core Drumpf cult members truly are.

As Adam Peck over at Think Progress noted yesterday, Trump supporters were hoping to “show the world their overwhelming response to the historic turnout for the Women's March at rallies across the country” this weekend. Sadly for them, the turnout ended up being what most would charitably describe as "underwhelming," with sparse crowds showing up to attend in cities across the country.

There were only about a hundred supporters--with a counter-protest of about fifty--who rallied in New York outside of Trump Tower to show their support, and of course, the Republican propaganda channel was out there to find out how well their constant brainwashing has worked on Trump's loyal supporters.

Here's Koch-head Pete Hegseth asking people at the rally what they think of the latest accusations from Orange Julius, accusing President Obama of “wiretapping” Trump Tower and for their opinion on the Trump administrations ties to Russia:

Q: Why are you all out here?

A: I felt motivated to support the president.A: We are the modern patriots.

Q: What you make of all the leaks that are coming out?

A: I think it's actually an organized attempt to try to undermine our president.A: I think to take down any president of the United States is a horrible thing to do because why wouldn't you want the president to be successful? Why wouldn't you want America to be successful?

A: I think to take down any president of the United States is a horrible thing to do because why wouldn't you want the president to be successful? Why wouldn't you want America to be successful?

That's the money quote! Wow! The hypocrisy oozes out of that statement like putrid pus out of an infected, untreated wound.

It is NOT an alternative fact that the right wing conservatives, led by the noxious Teabaggers spent every motherfucking waking, opportune minute of Barack Obama's 8 year term in office attempting to do precisely what that woman so piously opined - namely employing every unscrupulous, mean-spirited tactic in their power to delegitimize, undermine and sabotage the electoral political mandate of a popularly elected Democrat who just so happened to also be the nation's first African-American president. And while doing so, it was most certainly not beneath them to appeal to the worst racist instincts of some of this country's most deplorable citizen assholes - hell - even one-time Tea Party champion Glenn Beck finally came around and recognized that the driving force in Tea Party politics was it's racial animosity toward Obama and that hatred, more than anything is what was fueling the zealousness of it's movement's rank and file.

It truly takes some prodigious amounts of shamelessness and/or cluelessness to publicly utter a statement like that -- and whether it be out of sheer ignorance or malicious smugness -- much more so on national television. But it is Fox "News" (still not a legitimate news organization) and no doubt it was a statement that scored easy power points with Fox's Archie Bunker shut-in viewing demographic.

Ultimately, what The Gadfly is saying here is that sometimes he just wants to grab these dummies -- like the woman in this clip -- firmly by the shoulders, shake them violently until their teeth rattle, possibly toss in a couple of well meaning bitch slaps, and hope beyond all hope that something shakes loose in their rigid little lizard brains that helps them see the ray of light representing human decency that lies beyond the darkness of their cold, sunless world view.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

It can be reasonably argued that the Drumpf crazy train jumped the tracks quite some time ago. If that be the case, then at this point it appears that the train and all of it's trailing rail cars are cartwheeling madly down the embankment of a steep ravine and will soon be nothing more than a fiery pile of burning and twisted metals and wood and toxic fumes.

The Gadfly has only this to say about Mr. Drumpf and his flamboyant meltdown:

This obviously mentally incapacitated individual has the nuclear codes folks. And a lot of the people in his inner circle of "advisers" are delusional conspiracy loons from the cult world of Alex Jones and Dead Guy Named Breitbart "News."

Friday, March 3, 2017

Ahh -- yet another side tunnel emerges in the Drumpf/Russian connections rabbit hole:

By Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller March 1 at 9:35 PM

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaignto upend the U.S. presidential race.

Let's recall Mister Jeff's confirmation hearing and the exact words out of his own mouth shall we?:

❝ I did not have communications with the Russians... ❞

Repeat...

❝ I did not have communications with the Russians... ❞

Rinse, wash, repeat one last time...

❝ I did not have communications with the Russians... ❞

❝ DID NOT ❞ does not mean possibly.

❝ DID NOT ❞ does not mean conceivably.

❝ DID NOT ❞ does not mean perchance.

There is No ambiguity there folks. The English language is pretty clear on the meaning of the phrase ❝ DID NOT ❞ as used in a sentence.

It means exactly what it fucking means -- it means ❝ DID NOT ❞. It is a cut and dried declaration of not having done something.

All that this revelation of Session's contacts with the Russians, and subsequent lying about it in his confirmation hearing does is provide more convincing evidence to The Gadfly that these people are hiding something pretty goddamn nefarious surrounding Russia's cyber hacking, and who knows what other democracy undermining activities, in the run up to the election. How else are we to explain all of these accounts of these Drumpf surrogates privately meeting with Russia officials during the campaign, accounts which it must be noted, that are not being denied? And then, when the news stories come out about these dealings, why all of the lying and the obfuscation and the lame "I don't recall" what was discussed in those meetings statements?

The old adage about "where there's smoke, there's fire" seems to be quite applicable as it relates to these steady flow of Russian connections stories, however in this case, The Gadfly's view is that we are not dealing with just a small, sputtering blaze here, but a 4-alarm, flames shooting 100 feet in to the sky inferno.

All the more reason to appoint an independent counsel/investigator, with an unlimited budget and an unrestricted mandate to follow the evidence, no matter where it leads, no matter how long it takes, and no matter what the consequences, evidence which is to then be presented to the American people so they can form their own judgement of the matter.

American democracy deserves nothing less, and for those on the right who are such die-hard fanatics about passing voter id laws which they claim is a genuine, good faith effort to protect the integrity of our electoral system - then surely they must deem it imperative that we discover the truth as to whether our current president is in power as a result of interference and manipulation from a hostile, communist nation. Providing that these voter id law supporting conservatives aren't just rank hypocrites on the subject of our electoral integrity, it stands to reason that they ought to be the ones screaming the loudest from the rooftops for a thorough investigation of this Russian matter.